Jack Reacher 28 - The Secret, page 2
Reacher picked up the second rifle from the left. He checked that the chamber was empty, inspected it for defects, then slid a magazine into place. He stepped across to the mouth of the range. Selected single-fire mode. Took a breath. Held it. Waited for the next beat of his heart to subside and pulled the trigger. A hundred yards down range, the red star on the target figure’s helmet imploded. Reacher lowered the gun and glanced at the sergeant. The guy’s face betrayed nothing. No surprise. No disappointment. Reacher fired five more times. Rapidly. Sharp cracks rebounded off the walls. Spent cartridges rattled onto the cement floor. A neat T shape was hammered into the figure’s chest. It was textbook shooting. There was no sign of any problem with the gun. And still no response from the sergeant.
Reacher pointed to the magazine. “How many?”
The sergeant said, “Sixteen.”
“Vietnam?”
“Three tours. No misfires. If it’s not broke…”
Reacher slid the fire selector to its lowest position. Full auto. The model was old, from before the switch to three-shot bursts. He aimed at the target’s center mass and increased the pressure on the trigger. The green plastic torso should have been shredded. The ten remaining bullets should have torn through it in less than a second. But nothing happened. Because the trigger wouldn’t move. Reacher changed back to single-shot mode and lined up on the target’s face. The crude contour representing its nose split in half under the impact. Reacher toggled to full auto. Again, nothing happened. Which left no doubt. The trigger would not move in that position.
He said, “They all like this?”
The sergeant nodded. “All of them. The whole case.”
Reacher crossed to the bench and set the gun down. He removed the magazine, cleared the chamber, pushed out the takedown pins, separated the lower receiver, and examined its interior contours. Then he held it out toward the sergeant and said, “The trigger pocket’s the wrong size. It won’t accept the auto-sear. And there are only two trigger pinholes. There should be three.”
The sergeant said, “Correct.”
“This isn’t military spec. Someone’s switched out the original with a civilian version. It makes the gun semi-auto only.”
“Can’t see any other explanation.”
“Where did these come from?”
The sergeant shrugged. “Admin error. They were supposed to be sent for destruction but two crates got mixed up and these wound up here by mistake.”
Reacher looked down at the guns on the bench. “These would be considered end-of-life?”
The sergeant shrugged again. “I wouldn’t say so. Ask me, the condition’s acceptable for weapons that would generally be held in reserve. Nothing stood out when the crate was opened. Only when a malfunction was reported. Then I stripped the first one down. Saw the problem right away. Just like you did.”
“Who decides which weapons get destroyed?”
“A dedicated team. It’s a special procedure. Temporary. Lasted a year, so far. Result of Desert Storm. The war was a great opportunity for units to reequip. Assets that are designated surplus as a result come back from the Gulf and get sent here for evaluation. Firearms are our responsibility. We test them and give them a category. Green: fully serviceable, to be retained. Amber: marginally serviceable, to be sold or allocated to civilian gun safety programs. Doesn’t apply to fully automatic weapons, obviously. And red: unserviceable, to be destroyed.”
“You got sent a red crate when you should have gotten a green one?”
“Correct.”
Reacher paused for a moment. The account was plausible. There wasn’t a kind of equipment the army owned that hadn’t been sent to the wrong place, some time or other. Which was usually totally innocent. Like the sergeant said, an admin error. But Reacher was wondering if there could be a broader connection. Something to do with the recent report of stolen M16s. Someone could designate good weapons as unserviceable, fill their crates with the right weight of whatever trash came to hand, send that to the crusher or the furnace, and sell the guns on the black market. Officially the weapons would no longer exist, so no one would be looking for them. It was a feasible method. A loophole someone needed to close. But it wasn’t what had happened here. Reacher had read the report. The inspection was unannounced. A full crack-of-dawn, shock-and-awe operation. And it had been thorough. All the weapons crates on the entire base had been opened. All had the correct number of weapons inside. Not so much as a pocket knife was missing.
Not so much as a complete pocket knife…
Reacher said, “When did these guns get delivered to you in error?”
The sergeant looked away while he did the math, then said, “Fifteen days ago. And I know what you’re going to ask me next. You’re not going to like the answer.”
“What am I going to ask?”
“How you can trace which unit owned these weapons in the Gulf. Before they were sent back.”
“Why would I want to know that?”
“So you can figure out who’s stealing the lower receivers. Someone is stealing them, right? And selling them. So that gangbangers or whoever can make their AR-15s fully automatic. The Gulf’s the perfect place to swap parts out. Officially every last paperclip is tracked. But in reality? Different units have different systems. A few have switched to computers. Most are still paper-based. Paper gets lost. It gets wet. It gets ripped. Digits get transposed. People have handwriting that’s impossible to read. Long story short, you’d have a better chance of selling bikinis at a Mormon convention than tracking that crate.”
“You don’t think I have a future as a swimwear salesman?”
The sergeant blinked. “Sir?”
Reacher said, “No matter. I don’t care who had these guns in the Gulf. Because that’s not where the parts were stolen.”
* * *
Roberta and Veronica Sanson heard the impact all the way from the street outside. They heard the first of the screams over the background grumble of traffic. Then the cardiac monitor at the head of the bed started to howl again. Its lines had slumped back down to the horizontal. Its display read 00. No heart activity. Only this time the machine was correct. At least as far as Keith Bridgeman was concerned.
Roberta turned left into the corridor and made her way to the hospital’s central elevator bank. Veronica went right and looped around to the emergency staircase. Roberta reached the first floor before her sister. She strolled through the reception area, past the café and the store that sold balloons and flowers, and continued out of the main exit. She walked a block west then ducked into a phone booth. She pulled on a pair of latex gloves and called American Airlines. She asked for information about their routes and schedules. Next she called United. Then TWA. She weighed the options. Then she tossed the gloves in a trash can and made her way to the public parking lot in the center of the next block.
* * *
The sergeant led the way to a storeroom that was tacked onto the side of a large, squat building near the center of the site. The wind had picked up while they were at the range which made it hard for him to heave the metal door all the way open, and after Reacher had gone through the guy struggled to close it again without getting blown over. He finally wrestled it into place then locked it. Inside, the space was square, eighteen feet by eighteen. The floor was bare concrete. So was the ceiling. It was held up by metal girders that were coated with some kind of knobby fire retardant material and flanked by strip lights in protective cages. There was a phone mounted by the door and a set of shelves against each wall. They were made of heavy-duty steel, painted gray. Each had a stenciled sign attached—Intake, Green, Amber, Red—and a clipboard with a sheaf of papers hanging from its right-hand upright. There were no windows and the air was heavy with the smell of oil and solvents.
The shelves held crates of weapons. Short at the top, long at the bottom. There were fourteen crates on the Red shelves. Reacher pulled one of the long ones out onto the floor and cracked it open. He lifted out an M16. It was in much worse shape than the one he had fired earlier. That was for sure. He field-stripped it, checked its lower receiver, and shook his head.
He said, “It’s original.”
The sergeant opened another crate and examined one of its rifles. It was also pretty scuffed and scraped. He said, “This one’s the same.”
Each crate had a number stenciled on the side. Reacher took the Red clipboard off its hook and turned to the last sheet. It showed that the crate he’d picked had been signed off by someone with the initials UE. The crate the sergeant had chosen had been initialed by DS. Reacher could only see one other set: LH. He picked a crate with a corresponding number, removed the lower receiver from one of the guns inside it, and held the part up for the sergeant to see.
The sergeant said, “Jackpot.”
Reacher said, “LH signed off on this. Who’s LH?”
“Sergeant Hall. In charge of the inspection team.”
“Sergeant Hall’s a woman.”
“Yes. Sergeant Lisa Hall. How—”
“UE and DS are men?”
“Yes. But—”
“There are no other women on the team?”
“No. But I still—”
Reacher held up his hand. “Fifteen days ago you received a Red crate by mistake. Fourteen days ago we received a report that M16s had been stolen from this facility. We checked. They hadn’t.”
“I heard about the raid. I don’t see the connection.”
“The report was anonymous, but the voice was female. I read the file.”
“I still don’t—”
“Sergeant Hall realized a Red crate was missing the day after it got mishandled. She knew it could be traced back to her so she made a bogus accusation. A serious one. Stolen weapons. The investigators came running, just like she knew they would. They opened all the crates, including hers. They were looking for M16s. Complete ones. That’s what they found, so they closed the case. No crime detected. Then if the missing receivers came to light, Hall had just been cleared of theft. She was hoping an investigator would make the same jump you did. That the doctored weapons arrived that way, from the Gulf.”
“No. I know Lisa Hall. She wouldn’t do something like that.”
“Let’s make sure. Where is she today?”
“Don’t know, sir.”
“Then find out.”
“Sir.” The sergeant shuffled across to the phone on the wall. Thin clouds of dust puffed up around his feet. He dialed slowly, made the inquiry, and when he was done he said, “Not on duty, sir.”
Reacher said, “OK. So where’s her billet?”
* * *
Veronica Sanson was waiting for her sister, Roberta, on the fourth floor of the parking garage. She was standing at the side of a blue minivan. They had stolen it from the long-term lot at O’Hare when they arrived in the city, two days before. Roberta nodded a greeting and opened the van’s rear door. They took turns, one keeping watch, one hunkering down between the back seats and changing their clothes. Off came the hospital outfits. On went jeans and sneakers and shirts and jackets. All plain, anonymous items. When they were dressed the sisters hugged, retrieved their plain canvas duffels from the van’s narrow cargo area, wiped the vehicle clean of prints, then made their way to separate exits. Roberta threaded her way west. She pushed through knots of shoppers and tourists, past the wide storefronts and cafés and offices, until she reached the Clark/Lake El stop. Veronica walked south and kept going to Roosevelt, where the Orange Line emerged from its underground section.
* * *
Reacher liked the armory sergeant at Rock Island. He figured the guy was reasonably smart. Reasonably street wise. Reasonably capable of anticipating the kind of trouble he’d be in if Hall somehow got word that she was under suspicion. But Reacher was a cautious guy. He’d learned a long time ago that it can be dangerous to overestimate a person. That unit loyalty can run deeper than deference to a stranger. Especially when that stranger is an MP. So he made sure that the sergeant was clear about the consequences of any phone calls he might be tempted to make. He left no room for doubt. Then he requisitioned a car from the base’s motor pool and found his way to Hall’s address.
Hall lived in the last of a little knot of houses stretched out along a river about four miles east of the Arsenal’s main gate. Her home was small and neat. Set up for efficiency, Reacher thought. No fancy décor to maintain. No complicated yard work to stay on top of. There was no answer at the door when Reacher knocked. No sign of anyone through the windows, front or back. Just an array of budget furniture laid out as if someone had tried to re-create a picture from a low-cost catalog. There was nothing personal. No photographs. No ornaments. None of the knickknacks people use to impose their identity on a place. Reacher understood that. Aside from his four years at West Point he had spent his life bouncing from one base to another. Six months here. Six months there. Different countries. Different continents. Never anyplace long enough to feel at home. First as a kid, because his father had been an officer in the Marines. Then as an adult, as an officer himself. Maybe Hall had the same experience. Maybe she was anticipating her next change of station and didn’t want to waste effort on a place she knew she was soon going to quit. Or maybe she had another reason to be ready to leave in a hurry.
Reacher walked back to his borrowed car and settled in to wait. He wasn’t worried about how long it might take. He was a patient man. He had nowhere else to be. And he was naturally suited to two states of existence. Instant, explosive action. And near-catatonic stasis. It was the in-between he struggled with. The sitting through pointless meetings and reviews and briefings that made up so much of army life.
Chapter 3
The phone rang at 9:00 P.M. Eastern. That was 8:00 P.M. Central, where the call originated. Which was right on time.
It was answered immediately.
The guy who had dialed said, “Another one’s dead. Keith Bridgeman. Massive blunt force trauma resulting from falling out of his hospital room window. United Medical, Chicago. Twelfth floor. Had been recovering from a heart attack. Not out of the woods but was expected to pull through. Fine when the nurses did their rounds a couple of hours earlier. No reported visitors or calls or outside contact. The police are fifty/fifty, suicide or accident. He must have unlocked the window himself—the key was still in his pocket—but there was no note. All for now. More at 0800.”
“Understood.” The guy who had answered hung up.
* * *
Officially the telephone line they had used didn’t exist. It was one of the Pentagon’s ghost circuits. There were hundreds of them in the building. Maybe thousands. They generate no records, incoming or outgoing. The call that had just ended could never be traced. It could never be correlated with the next call made on the same line, but the Pentagon guy walked through to the outer office anyway. Old habits die hard. He picked up a different phone and dialed a number from memory. A number that was not written down anywhere. Not listed. Not officially in service.
The Pentagon guy’s call was picked up in the study of a house four miles away, in Georgetown, D.C. By Charles Stamoran. The Secretary of Defense of the United States of America.
The Pentagon guy repeated what he’d been told a minute earlier. Word for word. Neutral tone. No summarizing. No editorializing. The way Stamoran insisted it was done.
“Understood,” Stamoran said when the Pentagon guy stopped talking. “Wait one.”
Stamoran laid the handset down on the worn leather desktop, crossed to the window, and peered out from around the side of the closed drapes. He stared across the lawn, toward the pond and beyond that the wall, picturing the sensors and tripwires and hidden cameras, and he weighed what he’d just heard. He received briefings on all kinds of subjects, all the time. It was part of the job. One regular report he got was a list of significant deaths. Foreign leaders. Key military figures, friend and foe. Terrorist suspects. Essentially anyone who could upset the geopolitical status quo. Dry stuff, on the whole. But a perk of the job was that he got to add a few extra names for himself. Nothing official. Just people he had a personal interest in. One of these was a guy named Owen Buck. He had died of cancer four weeks ago. Nothing suspicious about that. On its own. Then another guy on his list had died. Varinder Singh. Electrocuted in his bath. A tape player had wound up in the water with him. Its cord was still plugged into the wall. Fifty/fifty, suicide or accident, the police had said. And now Keith Bridgeman had died. Also on his list. Also fifty/fifty. Not the kind of coincidence that was ever going to pass Stamoran’s smell test. That was for damn sure.
Stamoran returned to his desk and picked up the handset. “I’m going to give you three names. Geoff Brown. Michael Rymer. Charlie Adam. They’re already on my list. I want them under surveillance, twenty-four/seven, effective immediately. Send our best people. Someone looks at these guys funny, I want them in a cell before they can blink. In isolation. No one gets access until I send someone to question them.”
“Covert surveillance, sir? Or can the watchers make contact? Make it known what they’re doing?”
“Covert. Strictly hands-off. These guys are Company lifers. If they cotton onto the fact that we have reason to watch them, they’ll disappear faster than a politician who’s asked to keep a promise.”
“Understood.”
“And there’s a fourth name. Neville Pritchard. He’s also on my list. I want him in protective custody. The most secure place we have. The most remote. Now. Tonight. No delay.”
* * *
Stamoran dropped the receiver into its cradle and walked back to the window. Three guys were dead. Three would be watched. One would be put on ice. Which left one last name. Not on the list. Stamoran knew it, of course. So did Pritchard. But no one else did. Stamoran needed to keep things that way. The secret he had hidden for twenty-three years depended on it.
